Sunday, December 18, 2011

The Paul Room


                                           
                                              Eskridge Hotel Museum
                                             Wynnewood, Oklahoma


I just got back from another trip to Oklahoma. We got some work done on my mother Wenonah's house; we visited with my daughter and her family, and I got a chance to take another look at the Paul Room of the Wynnewood Historical Society Museum. My daughter Therese and her husband Kevin met us there.  

About twenty years ago my mother donated some of my grandmother's things to the Wynnewood museum, furniture, art work, clothing, books. It took me a long while to get into the building which isn't regularly open. Wynnewood is a small town, and it isn't near the interstate, so I don't suppose there are enough visitors to make it worthwhile to keep the museum open. The museum is located in the old Eskridge Hotel, just a half a block from the town's only stop light at the intersection of Kerr and McGee streets, honoring the founders of the Kerr-McGee oil company, which operates a refinery nearby.  

My mother chose Wynnewood for her donation because it is near where her grandfather, J. T. Rosser, first settled when he came to Indian Territory in 1888. Grandmother was only eleven. She told the story later about their trip to Indian Territory: 

I came to the Indian Territory with my father and mother. We were moving from Mississippi to the Indian Territory in wagons, working horses and oxen in 1889. I was eleven years old. I remember people telling my father that he would have to be on the lookout for horse thieves. We had some trouble while crossing Arkansas, but after we crossed into the Indian Territory we never were bothered by anyone. My father would buy feed from the Indians and they were the most accommodating people I ever met. We came through Muskogee but there wasn't much of a town there then. At that time there were but few roads and at times it looked as if it would be impossible to go any farther. After several months of traveling over rough country we located at Pauls Valley. My father traded the ox team, a tent and a few horses to Mr. John Burks for a lease that had a two room log house on it. This lease had never been worked but there was a plowed furrow around it. My father and brother began putting this prairie land in cultivation. There was open range at that time, and you could have all the hogs and cattle you wanted to own, but you had to have your brand and mark on them. 

SB 18, P 14. Interview with Mrs. Victoria M. Paul, September 14, 1937.


                                        Mrs. Victoria M. Rosser Paul


Grandpa, as my mother called her grandfather, left Cedartown Georgia in 1866 after the Civil War, and took his family west. At first it was only he and Emily, my great grandmother, and their daughter Cora. Eight other children were born along the way, a son Thomas and four girls: Kittie, Lillie, Victoria and Ada. A son and daughter, Luther and Eula, were lost to illness. Over about a twenty year period Grandpa worked his way across Mississippi, and Arkansas, settling for a few months or years in one place and then moving on to another. Grandmother was born in Pittsborough County Mississippi in 1877. Grandpa was actually headed for Texas to join his brother Ed, but he never made it. The land in Indian Territory was so fertile, and the Indians so hospitable that he decided to stay.

Grandpa's farm was actually closer to Cherokee town than it was to Wynnewood. Cherokee Town, which no longer exists, was named for a temporary camp of Cherokees making on their way from Texas to join their brothers in Indian Territory in about 1840. After he arrived, Grandpa hired a teacher and built a school for his girls and other nearby children, but later Grandmother went to a subscription school in Pauls Valley where she met Billie Paul, whom she would later marry. When her mother died in 1893 Grandmother and her younger sister Ada moved in with their older sister Cora who was married and living in Wynnewood. Cora was the proprietor of a millinery (hat) shop there.  

The Rosser girls were taught to be ladies, in spite of their frontier upbringing. They studied needlework, gardening, music - Grandmother played the melodian - and they learned to prepare fancy fruit and flower arrangements, and pastries. Grandmother didn't learn painting and charcoal drawing until about 1918, right after the start of WWI, when she was married and living in Oklahoma City during one of my grandfather's business ventures. My mother Wenonah was five at that time. Grandmother studied with a Mrs. Sheets there, the wife of a prominent physician. She did several oils and charcoals which hung in her house when I was little. I have a charcoal drawing she did then of a bust of a cherub sitting next to a vase full of brushes.  


                                                         Cherub
                                               Charcoal by V.M. Paul


When I finally got to see the museum I realized that it contained several of Grandmother's oil paintings, as well as a big charcoal drawing of a lion which always hung over the mantel of her fireplace. There was also a large brass figure of a lion sitting on the mantel. I don’t' know what happened to that. The lions were appropriate because Grandmother's living room furniture had lions' heads and paws on its backs and legs.


                         Sofa from Grandmother's Living Room Furniture


                                                         Lion
                                         Charcoal by V.M. Paul

 
                                                       Still Life
                                        Oil Painting by V.M. Paul


The museum has Grandmother's rocking chair which dates back to her marriage in 1898, a bed and a quilt, a beautiful old dress made with eyelet crochet, family pictures, and books. There was damage to the room 10 or 15 years ago when the roof caved in, and many of the original contents have been damaged or misplaced, but I was pleased to see that Grandmother's art work had survived.


Eyelet Embroidery Dress



                                         Grandmother's Rocking Chair
    

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